Twelve Steps For Doctoral Students

Tomorrow I am going help at a seminar at a day hosted by the Latimer Trust at Oak Hill College for people interested in persuing graduate studies in theology.

Here's what I am going to say, or part of it:

Lessons I have learnt about doctoral study on the way:

1. Few books, but good. Learn to be a good re-reader rather than try to read absolutely everything. Who cares if you can read 1000s of mediocre books and articles? Find the best. Read them carefully.
2. It may not look it, but thinking is hard work. Thinking takes time to be good. So you will need rest, and holidays, and fun, and diversions. And these will actually help the work progress! Even TV is good.
3. Footnotes should be fun. Slathering everything in footnotes is a bad habit that helps nothing. References are sometimes necessary, but if a footnote is merely a sign of indecision - 'I couldn't work out whether to put it in or not, so I put in a footnote' - cut it out or add it in.
4. Don't wait for inspiration, start writing from day one! Getting words down on paper is really important, because you actaully do much of your thinking while you are writing. This business of leaving writing till the third year is weird to me.
5. Read outside you topic. Attend seminars and lectures. It is amazing how much benefit I have gained from this. It is amazing how unforeseen connections will spring up from completely unrelated contexts. Also, if you are aspiring to be a teacher in a certain area, use the free time to fill in the holes in your knowledge.
6. Find readers for your work/read others' work. Your supervisor will read your work twice a term, perhaps. You will need more than that! The price you might have to pay, is that you will have to read someone else's work: but the pay-off there is that it is comforting to see how they are struggling too!
7. Overcome the evangelical tendency to polemicise. We tend to see life as a series of battles between the forces of good and the forces of evil. But good scholarship is not about polemics first and foremost. Simple either/ors are a bad habit, because the truth is rarely that simple. Your work will gain in sophistication and ultimately in its polemical usefulness if you can avoid a 'goodies' /'badies' mentality.
8. Find surpring friends. Look for surprising agreements or harmonies with your work in other writers/thinkers. Show how someone completely different to you comes to the same conclusion. This is a very powerful strategy for apologetics, too.
9. Find the toughest opponent. Fall under their sway, if only for a week or two: be convinced by their case for a time. Then your reply will carry authority. Your work is only as strong as the opponents you defeat! My tendency when I started was to find any nutter to have a debate with, because debating nutters is always easier than debating reasonable people whose assumptions on the whole I share but who come to different conclusions...
10. Don't talk about you work when you don't feel up to it. One of the shattering experiences for a graduate student is when a family member or friend asks you, 'so, what are actually doing then'? and NOTHING COHERENT comes out of your mouth. This happens to me ALL THE TIME. And you walk away feeling very discouraged about it. Have a prepared speech perhaps! However: I have found writing and talking about my project in other contexts extremely helpful - I find blogging like this. It is a way of accessing other areas of your brain because it is writing/talking in a different mode, somehow.
11. Trust your methodological instincts; go with what you know. You got this far because you have some idea of what theological work is about. You have read quite a bit already. So, use what you already have to your advantage! I often feel intimdated by those theologians who know more philosophy than me (that's most of 'em): I forget that my training was far more in the area of biblical studies and biblical theology. I need to lean more on this, and see it as an advantage, while at the same time not neglecting to deepen my philosophical understanding.
12. Keep doing ministry. Keep serving the people of God, because the tendency of the doctoral student is to wallow in the solitary self-indulgence of it all. Keep preaching/teaching/ministering. After all, what are we doing it all for? If you aren't already doing some ministry in the church, my question is: what are doing entering into graduate theological study? Are you sure you are called to this?

Addenda: I was going to say something about prayer, but I feel foolish and not a little shame hectoring anyone about prayer. I was also going to say as matter of importance: learn to write well. There is an AWFUL lot of bad and unclear and dull writing out there. Write well.

Canon and on

In recent discussions I have had here in Oxford the issue of the development of the canon has loomed large. Post-liberalism tends to agree with Roman Catholicism that the canon is the creation of the church, or is even a practice of the church. Quotes aren't arguments, but, here are three that caught my eye:

The idea that the Bible should rule the church is not poplar today, when leading scholars in the fields are immersed in their own mythology of cultural relativity, but it is a concept which would have seemed perfectly in order to all the Fathers of the church. Gerald Bray, Creeds, Councils and Chirst, p.52

The apostolic succession of the Church must mean that it is guided by the Canon, that is, by the prophetic and apostolic word as the necessary rule of every word that is valid in the Church. K.Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.1, p.104

…the theological issues related to the historical development of the canon may appear rather perplexing to biblical scholars and theologians who would not want to conclude that the biblical canon is a creation of the church. E. Schnabel, "History, theology and the biblical canon: an introduction to basic issues" in Themelios 20:2, 1995, 16.

Vale Bruce Metzger

Bruce Metzger, the doyen of textual critics in the modern era, died very recently.

I was interested to read him this morning saying this in his book The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance:

Although the fringes of the emerging canon remained unsettled for generations, a high degree of unanimity concerning the greater part of the New Testament was attained among the very diverse and scattered congregations of believers not only throughout the Mediterranean world but also over an area extending from Britain to Mesopotamia. (p. 76)

Of course, it is our postmodern tendency to emphasis the diversity and forget the coherence and unity... or to imagine that such unanimity must only have been achieved by the exercise of a centralised power and the engines of ecclesial bureaucracy.

Rahner on sacraments

Rahner posits the Chuch as the basic sacrament. The other (seven) sacraments occur when the church 'addresses itself to and involves itself totally in existentielly [sic] decisive sitiations in human life'.

He says that, if institution by Jesus is a criteria, then NONE of the sacraments can be traced back to Jesus for certain (following modern Biblical scholarship). Instead, the sacraments flow from the institution of the church by Jesus. The sevenfold sacraments are an interpretation by the church of its sacramental existence.

Man must respond in faith, hope and love: the sacraments are not 'magical', though they have been misunderstood as such.

He goes on to adopt an almost Calvinist description - in all the sacraments is 'the efficacious word of God.' They are a 'tangible word of God'. But also: 'It is precisely in a sacramental word, where the chuch addresses God's word to an individual in his quite concrete salvific situation, that the individual precisely as individual is addressed by the word of God in a way which is not found in the general word of preaching even in a really existentiell sermon...'

Harnack on Marcion

The legendary church historian Adolf von Harnack wrote about Marcion:

The innovations of Marcion are unmistakable. The way in which he attempted to sever Christianity from the Old Testament was a bold stroke which demanded the sacrifice of the dearest possession of Christianity as a religion, viz., the belief that the God of creation is also the God of redemption. And yet this innovation was partly caused by a religious conviction, the origin of which must be sought not in heathenism, but on Old Testament and Christian soil. For the bold Anti-judaist was the disciple of a Jewish thinker, Paul, and the origin of Marcion's antinomianism may be ultimately found in the prophets. It will always be the glory of Marcion in the early history of the Church that he, the born heathen, could appreciate the religious criticism of the Old Testament religion as formerly exercised by Paul. The antinomianism of Marcion was ultimately based on the strength of his religious feeling, on his personal religion as contrasted with all statutory religion That was also its basis in the case of the prophets and of Paul, only the statutory religion which was felt to be a burden and a fetter was different in each case. As regards the prophets, it was the outer sacrificial worship, and the deliverance was the idea of Jehovah's righteousness. In the case of Paul, it was the pharisaic treatment of the law, and the deliverance was righteousness by faith. To Marcion it was the sum of all that the past had described as a revelation of God: only what Christ had given him was of real value to him. In this conviction he founded a Church: Before him there was no such thing in the sense of a community, firmly united by a fixed conviction, harmoniously organized, and spread over the whole world. Such a Church the Apostle Paul had in his mind's eye, but he was not able to realize it...

Harnack could see the real power of Marcion's idea. He felt the temptation that Marcion felt, to make a separation between the two testaments, to put the stress on the radical newness of Paul's gospel and to highlight his critique of the old faith. Marcion was a remarkable planter of church communities - Harnack even goes so far as to make him the inventor of the Catholic church. Without Marcion the church would not have been able to conceive of its scriptures; it would not have been able to conceive of itself.

Rowan Williams and Orthodoxy

Of course in thinking about heresy (see previous post), it is worth thinking about what orthodoxy is. Rowan Williams has a very influential view which he established in his book about Arius: that heresy actually arises from the attempt to go further than our talking about God ought to go; that it results from rationalism - any 'attempt to clean up or rearrange Christian language which results in a major reduction of available resources of meaning.' It usually results when theologians value 'conceptual economy and precision over richness of symbolic resource' (as Higton puts it) 'when they make the attempt to tie things down too neatly, to control the various and excessove language of worship and devotion too closely.'

So, orthodoxy for its part is actually a refusal to go further in explaining, a deliberate drawing of the doctrinal circle in a wide rather than a narrow way. It is a victory for poets over bureaucrats: for those who want language that generates new possibilities of meaning over against those that would close them down and specify and deaden. The Nicene formulae (and their later Chalcedonian counterparts) refuse to explain how their may be a Son and Father who are equally God; or a person who is God and man. For Williams, then, the job of doctrine is to teach us silence as well as to circumscribe and guide our speech. Orthodoxy becomes then the steel framework around which Christians in each generation must build and rebuild, with considerable effort and not a little pain.

Now, parts of this vision strike me as problematic and a kind of postmodern retrojection back on the 4th century (he does this, bizarrely in my opinion, with Cranmer as well!) It could easily be caricatured as a very Anglican, very English approach to doctrine - i.e., the English are happy for minimalist view of the role of laws and constitutions because so much of their culture proceeds by convention and agreement. Notably, in the US, the opposite is true: laws and conventions have to do what they say on the packet. Americans (and other colonials!) find the vagueness of the English not liberating but rather frustrating, and a little dishonest (it isn't, but that is how it is perceived). Williams (showing his Hegelian colours) does rather focus on the agonising process of deliberation as an end in itself over against the decision/s of any such debates, too.

BUT: there is also something very appealing about Williams' notion of orthodoxy too. Earlier, for example, in talking about the atonement we struck an attempt to exclude the very old and certainly biblical idea of sacrificial substitution from an orthodox understanding of the atonement; and on the other side, Vanhoozer's warnings about rationalism and reductionism as tendencies in evangelical theological thinking. Both pitfalls are avoided if orthodoxy is practiced as Williams would have us practice it, certainly.

Necessary Heresy 1: Marcion, or how big is the Bible?

This week at St Ebbe's I am starting a series of three lectures entitled Necessary Heresies: What the Heretics Have to Teach Us.

We start on Wednesday with Marcion. Marcion - the wealthy son of a bishop (how did THAT happen?) - gained a great deal of influence in the 2nd century church and beyond for his teaching that the wrathful God of the Old Testament was in fact a different deity to that of the New. He rejected the OT as scripture, and also everything but the letters of Paul - and edited those as well! The Christian gospel was as he saw it a repudiation of everything that the OT stood for. Creation was the product of a malicious and wrathful demiurge, from whose clutches we were to be saved by the Son.

What is interesting here is the interplay between the scriptural/textual issue and the theological one. Marcion would have no truck with allegorising the distasteful bits of the OT away to make them palatable. He just wouldn't see them reconciled with the loving deity of the New - and so he rejected them on the basis of this theological criterion.

It is significant that Adolf von Harnack, the great German liberal-Protestant church historian, thought Marcion was the most significant theologian between Paul and Luther. Partly, this is because Marcion did get something right: he did understand the radical newness of the gospel - its breaking out of boundaries and its dissolving of religious strictures and superstitions. He did understand the import of Paul's radical critique of the torah. He did understand the heart of the gospel is not bare law but divine love.

But Harnack was badly wrong; as indeed was Marcion! It was of course the mission of 19th century liberal Protestantism to follow Marcion in his excision from the canon of the Bible parts that did not apparently square with gospel as they had determined it. The church of yore determined that this was not a step that was true to its own identity as a listening church, or as a Church of Jesus the Messiah: and this crisis forced it into recognition of the authoritative list of books that comprise the Bible, including the canon of the OT.

Is this heresy alive and well today?

Vanhoozer and the atonement, more of.

[For your greater edification and entertainment, a photo of me graduating with the Master of Studies (Research) degree from Oxford, a degree I didn't even know I was enrolled for or intend to achieve! But they let you wear a fancy gown, so - what the hey!]

I have been enjoying re-reading some of the essays in The Glory of the Atonement (ed. Hill and James). The survey of the biblical and historical material is thorough and careful and leaves me in no doubt that, if one wants to excise sacrificial language from the atonement (see below) or remove the substitutionary aspect, one does so against the overwhelming testimony of the scriptures and the tradition. Which is not to say that there isn't a subjective side to the atonement: it is just that if one has only the subjective side, it ain't enough.

Anyhow, Vanhoozer's essay is my favourite so far ("The Atonement in Postmodernity") - partly because it serves as a handbrake on some of the other essays. He goes so far as to accept the postmodern critique of theoria, at least up to a point. He writes:

The postmodern challenge requires us to develop a nonreductive doctrine of the atonement that perceives the saving significance of Jesus' death in terms other than this-worldly economies of exchange...

What the doctrine of the atonement attempts haltingly to articulate is the equal ultimacy of God's love and God's light (justice, holiness). On the cross neither mercy nor justice loses out; the cross is rather their mutual fulfillment. It is precisely for this reason that theories of the atonement must resist explanations that reduce the significance of Jesus ' death either to unconditional mercy or to uncompromising justice.

George Pattison on Girard and the atonement...

George Pattison in his book A Short Course in Christian Doctrine adapts Girard's work to Christian thinking about the atonement thus:

Earlier, I looked briefly at René Girard’s theory of sacrifice. …Scapegoating works in the sense that it unifies society (“One man must die for the people”!), but it works only at the cost of a massive collective self-deception, a refusal of the self-knowledge that we are each complicit in and responsible for the violence that the act of scapegoating seeks to purge. Seeing Jesus as the scapegoat who bears our sins and thus takes away the sin of the world is, according to Girard, completely to miss the point of what we actually find in the Gospels. For what we see there is the historically unique witness to the profound injustice of the scapegoat phenomenon and, for the first time in history, a victim who refuses to accept the justice of his death, who, in effect, proclaims that one man should not die for the people. For if each person is, in themselves, a reflection of the image and likeness of God and called to fellowship in the divine life, then no act of killing can be “God’s will”. [Thus the passion narrative] offers a decisive insight into the systemic, structural injustice of the human condition and, through this self-knowledge, demystifies and frees us from the otherwise universal mechanisms of mimetic desire and their inevitable violent outcome. The cross, as witnessed in the Gospels, does set us free. But it does not do so because it is the supreme sacrifice. Rather, it does so because it exposes sacrifice for what it is: murder. If we understand this, then that path is for evermore closed and we are set on the new path of mutual responsibility and care. Where the Church persists in interpreting the death of Jesus in sacrificial terms, however, we may suspect that the lesson has not yet been learned. It is salutary to reflect that the Victorians’ preoccupation with sacrifice and atonement provided an all too easy context for the mystification of what happened in the First World War as a Christ-like sacrifice. Only too late did Europe realize that this was…just plain slaughter.

My question is: has there ever been a time when the church did not interpret the death of Jesus in sacrificial terms - let alone in the explicit and persistent language of the NT itself? The language of 'as witnessed in the Gospels' can only be true on a very bad reading of them. Can we retain some of the insight about the cross - that it puts an end to sacrifice and exposes the death of Jesus as a vile murder of an innocent man - and yet still say as orthodox Christians always have, that it was a sacrifice, supremely so?

Mission is unsafe

Not only are the disciples of Christ called to follow after him: they are also sent by him into the world. The mission of Jesus further exposes his disciples to risk, because he sends them into situations where they will be opposed and rejected, beaten, tortured and killed. They are sent out ‘like sheep into the midst of wolves’ (Mt 10:16). They are not to creep unobserved into the corners of the world; Christ rather calls them to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations, ‘in Jerusalem, Samaria and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8) – which activity is most certainly for the public sphere. The churches thus are rightly addressed by Peter as a diaspora (1 Peter 1:1-2): they are a scattered gathering. The gospel expands space and foreshortens time: so, there is now not a location in particular that is more (or less) the site of God’s encounter with human beings. In fact, any place on earth will do. The scattered disciples take refuge in the eschatological and heavenly Jerusalem (as in Heb 12:22-3): they are present with the ascended Christ in heaven as he is ‘with them always, to the end of the age’ by the power of his Spirit.

Calvin on the Extent of the Atonement

My study-room mate here at Wycliffe Hall Russ Dawn has written an interesting paper comparing and contrasting Calvin and his successor Theodore Beza on a number of issues including the extent of the atonement. On the one side, R.T. Kendall claims that Calvin did not teach limited atonement, whereas Beza did. Richard Muller replies that Calvin upheld the Lombardian distinction between the sufficiency of Christ's work for all sin, and the efficiency of that work only for the elect. Russ writes:

It is not patent, however, that Muller has resolved all the difficulties. Kendall, for instance, recognises that in Calvin's thought, although Christ died for all, he only intercedes for the elect, but he interprets this as meaning that for Calvin the decree of election 'is not rendered effectual in Christ's death but in His ascension and intercession at the Father's right hand'...In the final analysis, the best reading is that Beza and Calvin differed on the extent of the atonement. Beza clearly espoused limited atonement, whereas Calvin could clearly express universal atonement, or less clearly express limited atonement. It would be a selective, possibily tendentious reading of Calvin to place him squarely in the camp of the doctrine of limited atonement.

Kendall himself says:

Fundamental to the doctrine of faith in John Calvin is his belief that Christ died indiscriminately for all men. Equally crucial however is his conviction that, until faith is given, 'all that He has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.'

This might be somewhat overstating the case: Calvin doesn't clear up this issue because it wasn't a question he was particularly conscious of. However, what IS interesting in Calvin is that (as with the sacraments) faith, which is itself a gift of God by the Holy Spirit, is needed in order to effect salvation.

Eliot and the city

Some of Eliot’s most important poetry addresses and exposes the false security of urban and suburban life. The strongest polemic from an explicitly Christian perspective is found in the Choruses from ‘The Rock’ where he rails aggressively against modern civilization in all its banality as ‘the land of lobelias and tennis flannels’. Eliot declaims against the city in the manner of an Old Testament prophet. However, even his pre-conversion poetry abounds with the same themes: one thinks of the torpor of Prufrock’s bourgeois routines measuring out his life ‘in coffee spoons’ and making an epic of his boredom and petty insecurities; or of the smog that blankets the city of ‘Preludes’; or of the hallucinatory patchwork of encounters in the London, the ‘unreal city’ of The Waste Land. Even before the introduction of an explicitly Christian theme to his poetry we can see the poetry itself as presented as a revelation of the true insecurity and instability of the city of man. The powerful sense of loss and bewilderment that pervades the earlier poems is coupled to a sense of becoming numbed: the sheer grind of urban life is stupefying. What does mark out a change - and which arguably makes the earlier poetry better as poetry - is that this earlier phase you get the sense of claustraphobic entrapment in modern city life which the poet himself cannot evade: This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. In Choruses from 'the Rock' there is more over-againstness; a more polemical and critical edge, perhaps, but with also an alternative vision offered.

We see this also in Murder in the Cathedral when the chorus - who are in their way voices from Eliot's past poetry, with their description of household drudgery and imprisonment of a life lived in fear - are tempered by the group of Priests and by Thomas himself. Thomas ought to have learnt through bitter experience that civilisation is not enough to secure human life against barbarism; but the temptation to return to that safer path - to share in the construction of an apparently greater shield of protection from the worst that humans can do to one another - is very great.

David Bentley Hart gets Calvin badly askew

David Bentley Hart restates the view (popular with the Radical Orthodox) which traces the decline of Western Christianity to the nominalism of the medieval period: when God became a kind of pure will. He sees Calvin as the moment when that poisoned stream becomes a flood:

...this state of theological decline was so precipitous and complete that it even became posible for someone as formidably intelligent as Calvin, without any apparent embarassment, to regard the fairly lurid portrait of the omnipotent despot of book III of his Institutes - who not only ordains the destiny of souls, but in fact predestines the first sin, and so brings the whole drama of creation and redemption to pass (including the eternal perdition of the vast majority of humanity) as a display of his own dread sovereignty - as a proper depiction of the Christian God. One ancient Augustinian misreading of Paul's ruminations upon the mystery of election had, at last, eventuated in fatalism... p. 134

This is a very nasty (and inaccurate) reading of Calvin, for whom God is primarily the life-giving and tender Father of his creation, and and loving redeemer of his people. This thought permeates the Institutes, rather than the pure omnipotent will of the scholastics. Again, the mode and style of Calvin's work makes all the difference - something you would think Hart would be hip to.

Gerrish on Calvin's Eucharistic Theology

Gerrish's great book Grace and Gratitude is one I have owned for many years and only now begun to read. Oh well...

He gives a terrific account of Calvin's pastoral concern in the Institutes - something he learnt from Erasmus; but that in addition, as his work progressed, he was concerned to show the thematic (if not 'systematic')coherence of his theology. The doctrines are not isolated entities, but mutually conditioning of one another.

Hence Gerrish's study of Calvin's Eucharistic theology is a useful introduction (well, so far!) into Calvin's work as a whole.

What becomes clearer in the final edition of Calvin's Institutes is that the father's liberality and his children's answering gratitude, or lack of it, is not only the theme of the Lord's Supper but a fundamental theme, perhaps the most fundamental theme, of an entire systeme of theology. It conveys, as nothing else can, the heart of Calvin's perception of God, humanity, and the harmony between them that was lost by Adam and restored by Christ...Piety and its renewal as faith in Christ - that is the subject of Calvin's pietatis summa. The holy banquet is simply the liturgical enactment of the them of grace and gratitude that lies at the heart of Calvin's entire theology... (p. 20).

Pierced for our transgressions

In response to some very silly books attacking Penal Substitutionary Atonement, including those by Steve Chalke and Joel Green, the Oak Hill trio of Mike Ovey, Andrew Sach and Steve Jeffrey have produced a book I am looking forward very much to reading: Pierced for our Transgressions - Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitutionary Atonement.

The table of contents looks fascinating: they give exhaustive answer to the many objections raised against PSA. Their account of the heritage of the doctrine is very interesting: the attacks on it have tried to relativise it by making it a product of particular medieval or renaissance conditions. (I would also say that particular conditions of modernity and the way in which we deal with criminality in our culture - ironically because of our Christian heritage - have lead to the doctrine being seen as distasteful and immoral: Foucault's Discipline and Punish is fascinating as an account for the genealogy of punishment in Western liberal society.)

However: there is a tendency in evangelicalism to make the doctrine under attack loom larger than it ought, or to make it the sine qua non of the preaching of the gospel. (PSA is not the gospel, though it is (I believe) a glorious doctrine explaining how exactly the gospel is good news.) This leads in practice to a trotting out of PSA formulae at every point, even when it isn't warranted by the text.
As
K.J. Vanhoozer writes (and his evangelical credentials are sound!):

the economy of covenantal grace is not exhausted by the logic of penal substitution even though the latter has a legitimate place.

Graeme Goldsworthy interviewed

A very interesting interview with my old teacher Graeme Goldsworthy is here. It is great to see his work gaining a worldwide readership and having an influence on the pulpit.

Rowan Williams on speaking parabolically

In an essay entitled 'The Judgement of the World' Rowan Williams proposes the intriguing idea of parabolic speech as a catalyst for a new kind of life: for conversion. The parables that Jesus told have the capacity to tranform people's perceptions: of themselves and of their communities. And indeed, his own life was a larger parable of the gospel of challenge and transformation. Jesus' telling of parables and teaching his disciples how to receive them is a preparation for us of the pattern of loss and recovery of the self that we will see in his death and resurrection story.

He goes on:

The transfiguring of the world in Christ can seem partial or marginal if we have not learned, by speaking and hearing parables, a willingness to lose th eidentities and perceptions we make for ourselves: all good stories change us if we hear them attentively; the most serious stories change us radically....And if we can accept a very general definition of parable as a narrative both dealing with and requiring 'conversion', radical loss and radical novelty, it may not be too far-fetched to say that the task of theology is the exploration of parable, and so of conversion.

Luther on the wheat and the tares

My recent fixation on ecclesiology, authority and Protestantism comes about partly because of the post-liberal and Radical Orthodox turns to ecclesiology. Time for some words from Luther to add to my Calvin posts!

Luther was able to point to the corruption of the papacy as a counter-testimony to its own assertion of its holiness. It was a proud and not a humble curia. It failed to see the church as a repenting church, as the listening as well as the preaching church, as the waiting as well as the declaring church. We must quickly add of course that the church of Clement VII was not the only compromised ecclesia in history. Luther’s sermon on the parable of the wheat and the tares (Mt 13:24-30) is his riposte: the visible church on earth is not the eschatologically purified church; rather there it is taught by even Christ himself that true and false will be side by side in it:

…we are not to think that only true Christians and the pure doctrine of God are to dwell upon the earth; but that there must be also false Christians and heretics in order that the true Christians may be approved.

Ecclesiastical triumphalism ought always to be curtailed by the impurity of the visible church; and by recognition that the eschatological identity of the church is as yet still greatly concealed. Must the church then ignore untruth? Luther preaches strongly against the use of judicial violence against false teachers and heretics. The only right means by which the church may be cleansed is by the power of the Word:

We have to do here with God's Word alone; for in this matter he who errs today may find the truth tomorrow. Who knows when the Word of God may touch his heart? But if he be burned at the stake, or otherwise destroyed, it is thereby assured that he can never find the truth; and thus the Word of God is snatched from him, and he must be lost, who otherwise might have been saved.

It is not a matter of restraint, but of conviction: the possibility of the turning of the heretic under the power of the Word of God is always maintained, in contrast to the rather final method of the Inquisitor.

Reporting on the church

An interesting article on media reporting of church matters - from a Roman Catholic perspective - is here. It responds in the first instance to the woeful reporting of the alleged union between Anglican and RC churches last week, which was based on... what exactly?

Calvin and the Calvinists?

For me, an intriguing question still persisting in historical theology relates to the relation between John Calvin and those Reformed thinkers that followed in his wake. The classic Barthian-influenced account, repeated many times, is that Calvin - as the normative Reformed theologian - represented a genuine break in content AND method from the medieval scholastic theologians. Calvin for his part was committed both to biblicism and to not speculating.Later scholars returned to the things he had repudiated, distorting and unbalancing Calvin-ism from then on. Basil Hall's landmark article in this and other ways set 'Calvin against the Calvinists'.

Richard Muller supported by Carl Trueman in recent years have returned fire. As Trueman writes:

The account of the development of Reformed theology which this definition of scholasticism promotes is one whereby the pristine, non-metaphysical, exegetical theology of Calvin is slowly replaced by a speculative, metaphysical, overly-rational, and hair-splitting dogmatism, as represented by later theologians such as Voetius, Turretin, and John Owen.

I myself have believed and passed this on: and especially the more Barthian thinkers will assume this narrative. Trueman's argument in response is that 1) Calvin isn't the normative figure everyone assumes - rather the great Reformed confessions hold that place; 2) the name 'Calvinism' is actually unhelpful and polemical; 3) we need to look to the occassion and nature of each of the texts under question to fairly evaluate them. 4) Scholasticism as a method (the use of syllogisms and so on) has had a bad press and in fact was just the pedagogical method available for working in the university of the time; 5) Aristotelian metaphysics and rationality were used by everybody because this was the rationality of the day: it is not in itself proof of distortion...

I am not yet convinced. I heed the warning about the complexity of the historical picture and the breadth of Reformed dogmatic theology. However, when we read Calvin we are breathing a different air from that we later breathe. Calvin's humanist background gave him a pedagogical method and style altogether different from the Paris of his youth. It was not an accident that this style liberated him as a theologian. In the Institutes he is quite polemical about exactly the vices you find displayed in the later Protestant Orthodox, because that method and style had produced such skewed results in the past...

The scattered gathering

Augustine in The City of God writes:

Scripture tells us that Cain founded a city, whereas Abel, as a pilgrim, did not found one. For the City of the saints is up above, although it produces citizens here below, and in their persons the City is on pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes. At the time it will assemble all those citizens as they rise again in their bodies; and they will be given the promised kingdom, where with their Prince, ‘the king of ages’, they will reign, world without end. (XV.1)

The church is an eschatologically gathered polis, in other words. In the book of Acts, the scattering of the disciples - because of persecution - is the impetus for mission. It parallels the scattering of the peoples in the early chapters of Genesis. In this way, the church ought not to exalt in its earthly structures as if these are in some way more than replicas or shadows of the eschatological reality in which it really has its existence. The church ought not to seek to foreshorten the eschatological gap between present experience and the promise that lies ahead. It ought not to proclaim the end of its pilgrimage, or that in coming to one place on the globe it has finally arrived at its destination, its promised land, its Jerusalem. It ought not to imagine that whatever unity it can construct here on earth is the definitive eschatological unity that will one day be realised. In fact, the organisational unity of churches may be a hinderance to the real unity and fellowship of Christians.

Admittedly, Augustine may not have taken this thought in this direction. For him, the impressive historical reality and success of the church was a very strong apologetic for its message...

Union between Canterbury and Rome?

This week a rather premature report came out regarding the possibility of union between Anglicans and Rome.

My dad (Archbishop of Sydney) had some interesting things to say about it here . I thought he was remarkably conciliatory for the kind of Protestant he is!

What would it take? Well, I think organisational unity is a distraction and at least in human terms unachieveable even if it was desireable. Far better to work at the local level... Bible study anyone? I think a real unity between believers is a possibility.

Part of the problem is the theology of the papacy. Not the papacy itself per se, but the untenable theology of the Petrine office. If the Popes actually exercised a remarkable biblical and spiritual leadership (as, I have to admit JP II did in part) then the authority of the papacy would become an attractive possibility. But I wouldn't want to be under papal authority in the way that it seems to be construed in Catholic formularies since Vatican 1.

Mike Higton on Rowan Williams

Mike Higton's book on Rowan Williams is a very readable and challenging introduction to Rowan Williams' work. His central theme is encapsulated in the title: the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, as preached by Williams is one that never leaves us comfortable or settled. It always challenges, always subverts, always complicates. It is never 'easy' in the sense of cheap.

The cross in Williams' thought stands for the judgement or condemnation of all our trying to secure for ourselves impregnable fortresses of certainty and security. The love of God in Christ is so total that it is almost unbearable to contemplate it. "We coat even the cross in sugar, and protect ourselves from the bitterness of the Gospel" (p. 35).

While he is generally affirming in his account, Higton finds this unrelenting darkness in Williams' theology itself almost too much: and I have to say it is a feeling I have had as well. In amongst the endless challenge, the persistent upsetting, what light is there, what joy? Higton writes:

It sometimes seems that Williams is willing to risk muting the note of joy, of thankfulness, of release and rescue, appropriate to the news that God has stepped over all the barriers which seperate us from him... We must ask, I think, whether the focus falls too consistently on the 'No' of the cross rather than on its encompassing 'Yes'. (p. 35)

Rahner on doctrinal boundaries

In the light of the Anglican Communion's drawing of a line in the doctrinal/ethical sand - well, kind of - I was interested to read this from our old friend Karl Rahner:

...a church cannot be a church if it would never have the courage to declare something anathema, if it could tolerate absolutely everything and anything as an equally justified opinion among Christians. (p. 382 Foundations of Christian Faith)

However: has there ever been such a church? Even the ultra-liberal revisionists have anathemas. They are forced to show where and who they would definitely exclude in order to meet precisely this criteria.

Immediately we have to ask about specifics. What are the core and basic truths? What are the negotiables? Rahner won't admit, as he goes on, that the dogmatic propositions of the faith are so easily detatchable from one another. They have a structure, which may be dislocated if even a small part is changed.

Anglican Communion gets tough

The Primates of the Anglican Communion have issued as tough a statement as you are likely to see in response to TEC (the US Episcopal Church). The call for discipline means a strengthening of the hand of the Communion itself to deal with errant dioceses. Sounds great, but:

This could be Sydney diocese.

If we go ahead with lay presidency - though it seems inconceivable from our point of view that the communion would care - we will be disciplined as TEC has been.

Is it really worth it? Worth risking all our property for? Worth risking our ties with Anglicans in Africa and Asia and England?

I don't think so.

Authority again

I have been invited by a Catholic priest and theologian acquaintance of mine to discuss the ARCIC document The Gift of Authority. The document says:

The meaning of the revealed Gospel of God is fully understood only within the Church. God’s revelation has been entrusted to a community. The Church cannot properly be described as an aggregate of individual believers, nor can its faith be considered the sum of the beliefs held by individuals. Believers are together the people of faith because they are incorporated by baptism into a community which receives the canonical Scriptures as the authentic Word of God; they receive faith within this community. The faith of the community precedes the faith of the individual. So, though one person’s journey of faith may begin with individual reading of Scripture, it cannot remain there. Individualistic interpretation of the Scriptures is not attuned to the reading of the text within the life of the Church and is incompatible with the nature of the authority of the revealed Word of God (cf. 2 Pet 1.20-21). Word of God and Church of God cannot be put asunder.

Can we assent to this really and maintain a Reformation understanding of the authority of scripture? It sounds to me as if this is paving the way for the authority of the Church to interpret scripture ...

Interview with The Exiled Preacher

I got interviewed by the Exiled Preacher

'Within Tradition, the Scriptures...'

Within Tradition the Scriptures occupy a unique and normative place and belong to what has been given once for all. As the written witness to God’s "Yes" they require the Church constantly to measure its teaching, preaching and action against them. "Since the Scriptures are the uniquely inspired witness to divine revelation, the Church’s expression of that revelation must be tested by its consonance with Scripture" (Authority in the Church: Elucidation, 2). Through the Scriptures God’s revelation is made present and transmitted in the life of the Church. The "Yes" of God is recognised in and through the "Amen" of the Church which receives the authentic revelation of God. By receiving certain texts as true witnesses to divine revelation, the Church identified its Holy Scriptures. It regards this corpus alone as the inspired Word of God written and, as such, uniquely authoritative.

(From 'The Gift of Authority' Anglican-Roman Catholc International Commission, 1999)

Am I happy with this? Are the scriptures 'within Tradition', or is that somehow not enough? I do appreciate the statement about the uniqueness and inspiration of the Scriptures...

Anglican/Roman Catholic Statement: 'The Gift of Authority'

I love this bit about 'cannot refrain from transmitting it to others (of course)', here interestingly framed in terms of the passing on of the tradition:

Tradition is a channel of the love of God, making it accessible in the Church and in the world today. Through it, from one generation to another, and from one place to another, humanity shares communion in the Holy Trinity. By the process of tradition, the Church ministers the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the koinonia of the Holy Spirit (cf. 2 Cor 13.14). Therefore Tradition is integral to the economy of grace, love and communion. For those whose ears have not heard and eyes have not seen, the moment of receiving the saving Gospel is an experience of enlightenment, forgiveness, healing, liberation. Those who participate in the communion of the Gospel cannot refrain from transmitting it to others, even if this means martyrdom. Tradition is both a treasure to be received by the people of God and a gift to be shared with all humanity.

'O Jerusalem...'

Not only was Jerusalem as the holy city the source of divine protection: the Davidic King, whose royal seat this was, was the specific and particular addressee of God’s promise of protection. The narrative of David’s war with Saul is an embodiment for Israel of God’s miraculous protection of his anointed. Yhwh’s covenant with David in 2 Sam 7 repeats and intensifies the earlier covenant promises of blessing, protection and generation. The Land will be a place of no disruption from the enemies that surround them:

10 And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more, as formerly, 11from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. (2 Sam 7:10-11)

The eternal rule of the Son of David – including his castigation – is the guarantee of this promise. The Psalms then give voice to this hope from the perspective of the Messianic King in the face of the experience of radical threat. In taking up the Psalter we are immediately thrown into a world characterised by conflict, confusion, doubt, enmity, and violence: the nations conspire against Yhwh and his anointed (Psalm 2:1-2) hoping to overthrow their rule. The Psalmist pleads with Yhwh for deliverance in the face of personal and national disaster. His character is known: especially his love for justice and his all-knowing perspective. So the Psalmist seeks refuge in God again and again. God is the rock (Ps 19:14) the shield (Ps 3:3), the fortress ( Ps 59:16) and the refuge (Ps 59:16). Sometimes, indeed, the hope is barely present, if at all; and the voice of the Psalmist becomes a cry of despair. Clearly, the affliction of Israel at the hands of evildoers was not yet at an end.

Orombi on Luwum

Sermon by Archbiship Orombi of Uganda about Janani Luwum here.

Moffatt opines

Justin makes a really good point about the value of knowledge and learning in the evangelical community here.

Basically, we is dumbing it down...

Show no mercy...?

Moses says to Israel:

Deuteronomy 7:1-2 "When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than yourselves, 2 and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.

What can a biblical Christian make of this? The word of God, or the word of Man?

Risk Culture

As I noted a couple of days ago, late-modern culture is a risk culture in which management of risk forms an essential component of self-construction. Yet, modernity is good at micro-managing risk but not macro-managing it: there is also a renewed sense of apocalypticism associated with the side-effects of technology.

Because individuals are ultimately powerless to alter this horrible element of risk, belief in fortuna has become a renewed - and necessary - feature of modern life. That is, there is a resignation to the engines of fate: a sense that some alien force turns the wheel of this dumb-show (to misquote Thomas Hardy). This is why we like to gamble!

One of the reasons for secular distaste for strong religious belief is that religious fervour seems to increase the risk felt by the whole community: it is an unnecessary daring of fate to intervene. Strong belief is a powerful force that may skew the forces of fate against us; it may upset the delicate balance that enables us to live our consumption rich quiet lives.

The Beauty of the Infinite: 'The city and the wastes'

Hart's style is by turns infuriating, self-indulgent, hilarious and transcendent. It is obviously a deliberate choice to write in this way because of some aesthetic sensibility, given the book's subject matter. However, he doesn't always pull it off, it must be said.

In this brief chapter he takes on Milbank's critique of the post-moderns and Heidegger, explaining that they themselves did not escape the metaphysics of violence. Despite the left-wing credentials of Foucault, Derrida and co, Milbank argues that the neo-Nietzcheans cannot wriggle out of the implication that nihilism's true practical expression is fascism. He sees the ethical work of these philosophers as aberrent, postmodernism's 'emptiest gesture'. The postmoderns as power-critics are blind to their own use of power. In addition, postmodernism, far from overturning metaphysics, actually confirms it.

So Heidegger, also:

The Heideggerian project is, both late and early, just another transcendental vantage on being, and one whose own metaphysical presuppositions confine philosophy within th enarrative of a more subtle but more inescapable ontological violence: a univocal account of being which makes out the ruptures in or transition among manifestations of difference to be inadjudicable and arbitrary expressions of a being hidden by what has being. p. 42

(what the...?!)

Giddens on Risk

Anthony Giddens points out that trust is essential for 'an early sense of ontological security'...it is 'basic to a 'protective cocoon' which stands guard over the self in its dealings with everyday reality. Trouble is, we live in a 'risk culture'. Which is to say, the concept of risk has become fundamental to the way we organise the social world:

Under conditions of modernity, the future is continually drawn into the present by means of the reflexive organisation of knowledge environments (p. 4, Modernity and Self-Identity)

Not that life is now more risky than it was, but that the parameters of risk have changed: so that the modern world is beset by an apocalypticism unknown to the past. Modernity has produced security, and a better means of calculating risk, but it has also brought nuclear weapons and environmental degradation. What do we do with this sense of doom then? Well -

If most successfully bracket out such possibilities and get on with their day-to-day activities, this is no doubt because they assess the actual element of risk involved as very small. But it is also because the risks in question are given over to fate - one aspect of the return of fortuna in late modernity... (p. 183)

He continues:

There is a good deal of evidence to indicate that unconscious fears of an 'ending to everything' are prevalent among many sectors of the population, and appear with particular clarity in the fantasies and dreams of children.

Safety and the City

In the Scriptures, the promise of protection is necessary foil to the promise of provision. As soon as man steps outside the Garden, he is unsafe. Abel was not safe from the jealousy of his brother; Cain in his turn was not safe from the possibility of vengeance as a wanderer on the earth and needed protection. It is this wandering nomad, in fear for his life because of his own bloodguilt, who becomes the founder of the city of Enoch, named after his son (Gen 4:17). Though civilization shows the evidence of human flourishing – the beginnings of farming and tool-making and music – it is also begun out of fear of reprisal. The city is as much fortress as it is forum. Far from bringing anarchy, the turn of humankind away from God (and the revelation of their wickedness, 6:5) results in a collaboration amongst human beings that is ambivalent. The mission of mankind to fill the earth, renewed in 5:1, is hampered by the rather sullen insistence of people that they ought to collect together for fear of the murderous intentions of other beings.

Yet, it is too simplistic to read the Tower of Babel as merely a tale of pride gone wrong. The desire which drives the massive collective exercise of its construction (using bricks!) is not merely arrogance. The proposed city is to have a ‘tower with its top in the heavens’, granting a heavenly perspective on the earth; and it will be the occasion of the making of name for themselves (Gen 11:4). But there is also a note of fear in the motivation given: ‘otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’. What was so unappealing about being scattered in this way?

Byron starts on The Beauty of the Infinite: and Christian rhetoric

Byron has begun his reading of David B Hart's book!

Here is my comment on a similar passage:

The Beauty of the Infinite: and Christian rhetoric

Participating in Seminars: a guide

I sit in and participate in several academic seminars with an international and ecumenical membership, both formal and informal in nature. Sometimes they work really well as delightful mutual learning experiences; sometimes of course they don't. I notice that sometimes I say something (or someone else does) and it doesn't actually advance the discussion, it just confuses it, or sidetracks it, or diverts it. So, I have been thinking recently: what is the most 'helpful' way to contribute to one of these seminars? So, in the spirit of contemporary knowledge: a list. (An important note: I find myself breaking these all over the place!)

1. Do read the text under consideration before you come. Do have a couple of things you might raise as interesting points for discussion.

2. Be brief-ish: keep your comments to a sentence or two. Don't dominate. Advance the discussion rather than colonise it.

3. Be clear, or strive for clarity, rather than waffle till something intelligible arrives.

4. Be opinionated, please; but don't rant or preach. And try to say new things (for you) rather than return to the same criticism or the same author you trotted out last week - try to expand your range of comments.

5. Refer to the text in question as much as you can: this allows everyone a toe-hold in the discussion.

6. Try to understand before you criticise - it is a really big temptation to want to critique first.

7. Don't repeat yourself if people don't agree with you.

8. Ask others to clarify what they have just said, and do challenge it when necessary. Promote good communal listening practices.

9. Try to put emotions aside, and be ready to apologise for words out of turn.

10. Humour can increase the groups enjoyment of the subject: but use it sparingly.

11. Hang around after class and get to know people - increased trust increases the possibilities available to the class.

12. Bring snacks.

13. Change the subject if you feel it lagging, but not prematurely.

14. Anecdotes are almost always a waste of everyone's time. Think about it, then decide against. (I can't help myself...)


Any others?

PS - the seminars I am attending at the moment are very enjoyable, and I think it is partly because of observation of most if not all of these suggestions by the members!

Human Unity Otherwise Described...

As the NT talks about the people of God, it describes them as united in the basic quality of their existence: there is one Lord, one Faith, one baptism, one God and father of all (so Eph 4:2-5). There is not a need for the dissolving of cultural and personal differences – because there is a unity founded on something far deeper. Galatians 3:26 should not be over-read in this connection. As Bernd Wannenwetsch puts it:

The contrasting pairs Jew-Greek, man-woman, freeman-slave, listed in Galatians 3:26ff represented – and represent still – fundamental differences, ethnic and religious, sexual and economic…the intention was not to abolish these antinomies in general. They are to be set aside in a quite precise sense: the political one.[1]

However, the experience of transformed relationships and unity in the church’s life could not leave untouched what being Jew or Greek, man or woman, freeman or slave meant for life outside the church. Wannenwetsch continues:

God’s Spirit, which rules the ekklesia, relativises the ties with all the different political, economic, and ethnic systems which are determined by another spirit, the spirit of self-preservation.[2]

The point of Paul’s body metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12 is that human difference and distinction are not obliterated in Christ but brought together by the Spirit and found complementary. Conformity is to be found in imitation of Christ (1 Cor 11:1). The futility of Gentile living is to be abandoned (1 Cor 6:12ff): together the body finds a unity of purpose in living in a way which pleases God, keeping unity and peace with the other members of the body.

[1] Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens p.136-7.
[2] Ibid. p. 142

Review published in Studies in Christian Ethics

My review of -

Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). xvii + 335 pp. £26 (hb), ISBN 0–231–12986–6.

has been published in Studies of Christian Ethics 20.1 (2007) p. 125f.

More Globalisation

Globalisation may be interpreted as a secular western liberal adaptation of a Christian vision. The linchpin of globalisation is a liberal view of market economies, so that trade barriers are minimized if not removed (as they were between Australia and the USA in 2004-5). Free trade can have the positive effect in small economies of breaking down the wealth and power of oligarchies in favour of the majority; which has the apparent effect of advancing western liberal values.

This of course worked in Eastern Europe, where religious life had been by and large suppressed; but has had limited success in the Islamic world. It was relatively easy to dazzle the citizens of the gray cities of the communist bloc with consumer goods and so to turn them against their governments. As President George W. Bush’s 2005 inauguration address revealed, the emancipatory master narrative of freedom is also being applied globally (and, ironically, by force if necessary). Globalisation means, in reality, the universal application of liberal values. Human fraternity – a secular catholicity – will be achieved in the end because Western culture is assumed to be the universal – or, at least, the universally desired – civilization. This is a soteriology without an eschatology: in other words, the ‘end of history’ is to be proclaimed from within history. In other words, what we may readily observe with secular western liberalism is a secular form of post-millennialism.

Calvin - from the Nursing Mothers' Association

John Calvin, commenting on Gen 2 writes:

". . .the Lord does not in vain prepare nutriment for children in their mothers' bosoms, before they are born. But those on whom he confers the honor of mothers, he, in this way, constitutes nurses; and they who deem it a hardship to nourish their own offspring, break, as far as they are able, the sacred bond of nature. If disease, or anything of that kind, is the hindrance, they have a just excuse; but for mothers voluntarily, and for their own pleasure, to avoid the trouble of nursing, and thus to make themselves only half-mothers, is a shameful corruption."

Interesting theological/ethical method here: he takes a feature of women's bodily nature and derives an ethical imperative from that alone... hmm. What other imperatives could you derive from the same method?

Globalisation - is God in it? How?

Described as the ‘emerging and homogenizing culture that tends to impact individuals and societies in all parts of the world,’[1] there is little dispute over that fact that globalisation is occurring – just as to whether it is desirable or not. ‘Globalisation’ describes, for example, the product of the felt ‘shrinking’ of the world as a result of developments in technology, the increased ability of multi-national corporations to reach every corner of the earth with their products, and the mass migration and intermingling of people groups in megacities. In the opinion of Max L. Stackhouse ‘the larger reality is that the whole world is becoming one place, an inclusive field of spaces, peoples and activities.’[2] Positive accounts of globalisation view it as producing a feeling that the world is becoming unified – it is available to be explored and experienced quickly and without much effort. The freeing of markets allows for consumers and sellers to transcend national boundaries. ‘God is in globalisation’, writes Stackhouse;[3] in fact, he suggests that it is a side effect of the missionary genius of Christianity. Could it be that the epoch of globalisation represents a gathering of the nations in unity on a scale about which the Bible only prophesies? Is this finally a genuine achievement of human fraternity and catholicity - a salvation of humanity, perhaps?


[1] Kurien, “Globalization: An Economist's Perspective,” p. 197.
[2] Max L. Stackhouse, “Public Theology and Political Economy in the Globalising Era,” in Public Theology for the 21st Century: Essays in Honour of Duncan B. Forrester, ed. Duncan B. Forrester, William Storrar, and Andrew Morton (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2004), p. 179.
[3] Ibid. I mean of course he is if you believe in providence: but, is it a blessing or a curse? A Babel or a Pentecost?

Prestige on Marcion

GL Prestige's great old book Fathers and Heretics (or 'Daddies and Baddies' as it used to be called by theological students) throws up much interesting material on the making of Christian doctrine in the crucible of heresy. On Marcion he writes:

...if the physical world, grounded in matter, were really the creation of a divine being, and not the self-subsistent organ of a mechanical fate, the pagan mind shrank from attritbutig so imperfect a structure to the creative hand of perfection; it must have been created either by some lower angel, far removed from the almighty Father, or else by the dialbolic enemy; the world was either a mistake or an affront. In contrast with all such speculations, the Christian Gospel offered a message of salvation from the one God and Father of mankind, who, in spite of Marcion's denial, was the direct Creator of the universe, and who, instead of numerous degenerating emaninations or a multiplicity of defective local gods and goddesses, had one single divine Son or Image as the full expression of His being throughout eternity, and the complete revelation of His deity in terms of human life. This was a very different idea of God from anything propounded in the speculations of the highest paganism. It was clear and definite where they were vague; it was rooted in history, while they were floating in imaginitive abstraction. While they rejected the world, it accepted the world and provided for the fulfilment of its purpose even in teh act of its transformation into new heavens and a new earth... p. 37

The Christian Bible then is directly a result of Christian theology: the decision to include the OT was in part necessitated by who the Christian gospel said that God himself was. The Bible does not merely generate Christian theology; it reflects it. Well: that's not quite right, or at least, not quite the full story. But certainly, the rootedness of the gospel in salvation-history is very early on discovered to be non-negotiable; and so: yes, we read the OT as Christian scripture.

Is postmoderism passe?

While giving my lecture on the clarity of scripture on Wednesday, a man asked me: 'is the whole postmodernism thing now old-hat? Can we now say we have moved on?'

I found it a hard question to answer - partly because any of those zeitgeist questions are impossible to give an answer to I guess. As a lay person, I think his frustration was with popular pomo: pomo as it has been filtered down through newspapers and education departments and so on. Derrida for dummies...

I guess also that the term postmodernism is itself used to describe a variety of things: from a high-blown francophone post-Nietzchean linguistic turn to the fact that Pulp Fiction has several narratives in a non-linear fashion. It is a style as well as a philosophy.

So: how should I have answered his question?

One Faith – JI Packer and Thomas C. Oden

Evangelicals seem to be great squabblers. They divide over all sorts of issues: from creationism to the millennium and all the bits in between, it seems. The word “evangelical” itself seems particularly rubbery, implying “fundamentalism” to some, “charismatic” to others, referring to a liturgical style at one point or to a right-wing social programme at another. It can appear that to be an evangelical is to live in a lonely world. What I mean is: there just aren’t that many amillennial paedobaptist four-point Calvinist theistic-evolutionist episcopalian congregationalist non-charismatic complementarians out there...[and if you are out there, could you please give me a call?]

The thesis of One Faith-the Evangelical Consensus by J.I. Packer and Thomas C. Oden is that a comparison of statements of faith from across the evangelical world in fact reveals a remarkable consensus of belief. The evangelical movement, much derided in some quarters as an aberration or a dinosaur, is in fact a growing cohesive global entity. The creeds compared show that this unity is founded on an orthodox doctrine of God in three persons, and on the evangelical distinctives of the authority of scripture, the necessity of the atoning blood of Christ for the forgiveness of sins, justification by grace through faith alone, the work of the holy spirit in conversion and the hope of Christ’s return.

After an interesting introduction, the bulk of the book is a list of creeds garnered from evangelical organizations world-wide and compared on various topics. It isn’t exactly a scintillating read, I have to say, and never quite rises to the dizzying heights its editors promise. The worth of the book is more as a reference with an essay attached. Disappointingly, while doctrinal statements from Canada, Belgium, Japan and South America are used, not one Australian statement made it into the lists. Left off again!

The listing of the extracts from the statements offers, however, heart-warming evidence that evangelicalism is a vibrant world-wide movement with a remarkable consensus of belief shared by its adherents - despite denominational, national, linguistic and other differences. Our theological views cannot be dismissed as eccentric, novel or aberrant; in fact, they are biblically and historically grounded and intellectually robust.

The section on “the People of God” reveals very little on church order and sacraments – it is characteristic of evangelicalism that matters ecclesiological are held to be second-order. The evidence presented in this book proves that evangelicals have always sought to work across denominational boundaries and are still seeking to do so without waiting for merely bureaucratic solutions. Here is indeed a true ecumenism. I was encouraged to remember that true agreement on the great truths of the faith is widespread.

However, I wonder whether the book concealed some of the deep differences among evangelicals, too. While the section on scripture contained some very strong affirmations of the authority and inerrancy of the Bible it is clear that this is worked out in vastly different ways among people who would own the name “evangelical”. Evangelical scholars need to continue to work hard at clarifying their doctrine of scripture. The section on “the Last Things”, also papered over some very wide cracks...

Les Murray's Collected Poems

[Yes, English readers: there are Australian poets who write about subjects other than sport...]

It's a body-prayer, a shower: you're
In touch all over, renewing, enfolded in a wing – (p.501)

I really think you should read some of Les Murray's poetry. Les Murray is arguably Australia's best regarded poet, both in Australia and internationally. The collecting of forty years of his work in a single volume shows just how impressive his achievement is. His unique accent – which he says is part of the soil up Bunyah way – and his extraordinary, prodigious gift of language combine in poetry that is at once chatty-colloquial and demanding. He doodles with words in the same way Shakespeare did. He writes with a mordant humour and a laughing sadness that is distinctively Australian and shows that a distinctively Australian poetry doesn't have to be of the bush-ballad variety.

I found at first, reading Murray, that his work was prickly, difficult and unyielding. What helped me was finding that a couple of common threads are wound into his work: the great Australian barbecue stoppers: politics and religion. Firstly, Murray has a fiercely independent vision of Australia and of the world. He sees himself articulating the languauge the common man against the elitism of the city-bound latte set. This slight paranoia is aimed at the urban media and academic castes who patronize the rural less-privileged – people like Murray himself.

…It's called Big Shame, my poison-brother fellow
says, this feeling abashed by proper people.
Before Racist and Beaut Authentic, we were Low…(p.480)

When Sydney and the Bush meet now
There is no common ground. (p.124)

He speaks the accent of the Aussie outsider, the "battler" of popular legend. For example, he rails against the Australian tendency to savage well-known females like Hanson, Lawrence, Chamberlain and Kernot:

In Australia, a lone woman
Is being crucified by the Press
At any given moment

With no unedited right
of reply, she is cast out
into Aboriginal space. (p.466)

This political no-woman's land is shared by the dirt farmers and the aborigines, adrift from privilege and the language of "rights". One of Murray's pet hates is the way in which (white) academics and bureaucrats have turned the language of Aboriginal rights against country people, as if their rural cousins are to blame for their bad conscience. The perhaps surprising affinity between rural whites and their aboriginal neighbours he captures in an early poem entitled "Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit":
Murray is a deeply religious poet and writes deeply religious poetry, in defiance of the secularism of the intelligentsia: "Snobs mind us off religion/ nowadays, if they can" (p.432).

Leaving behind the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his upbringing, Murray found in Catholicism the religious counterpart to his calling as a poet:

Prose is protestant-agnostic,
Story, discussion, significance,
but poetry is Catholic;
poetry is presence. (p.341)

He writes in his collection of prose The Quality of Sprawl that "in the Free Church service of my childhood, with its emphasis on the sermon, there wasn't enough receptive silence; there was no sense of ceremony deepened to the point where human activity briefly fell away and God was present." It is this "presence" that Murray tries to capture in his poetry. After all, as he writes in "Poetry and Religion" (p.265), "Religions are poems." What he means is that true religion is a "dreaming", an act of the imagination. Just as you can't pray a lie, so "you can't poe one either." God is "the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned."

It is this "presence" which fills Murray's luminescent nature poetry. The series of animal poems, entitled sure enough "Presence: Translations from the Natural World" (p.355-378), serve to illustrate. "Bat's Ultrasound" ends with this remarkable coda:

Ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
Ere your raw row) we air our array,
Err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery,
Our eerie u our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh. (p.355)

Murray's eye captures the glint of God in the creation in a way that Gerard Manley Hopkins did a century ago; and as with Hopkins, the beauty and playfulness of his language mirrors what he sees in nature. It is a sublime tuning of the gift of language to the divine key. Murray's ear is also "rare". I am reminded in these poems of the playful and yet awe-some animal poems of the Bible, whose point is to draw glory to the creator from contemplation of the creatures: Job 38-39 and Psalm 104.

Murray has much to say in prose and poetry about the "religion" of Australia. He recognizes that the spiritual energy of Australians is more and more absorbed by the quest for "national and communal identity". The Anzac myth is not as sacred as we think:

In the dream, Clarrie Dunn
Sits naked with many thousands
In the muddy trench. He is saying
The true god gives his flesh and blood.
Idols demand yours off you. (p.554)

Australia is in a drift away from traditional Christianity, but has not found an adequate replacement; and so we have become a nation of unsatisfied spiritual longings which are only met by the shallowest of new-age mumblings. He urges Australian Christians not to "be tempted to see ourselves as a team that has to win for God; He is not helpless – and anyway His idea of a win is the Cross, which may be the place where the truly irresoluble contradictions, by which out life in the world is torn but also perhaps powered, meet and get the only resolution they can obtain, that is a living continuous one which we've agreed to take part in after all" (The Quality of Sprawl, p.47).

There is of course a great deal more to his poetry than politics and religion I would hasten to add. The Collected Poems contains poems that will never leave me for their wit, their beauty and their sadness. Read his poetry alongside the excellent biography by Sydney Anglican Peter Alexander.

Global Warming hits Oxford

Rahner comments on verbal inspiration

I was intrigued to find sections in Rahner's book Foundations which support the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture as doctrines of the Catholic church.

Rahner makes a telling comment I think about Protestant doctrines of scripture:

...the old Reformation doctrine of scripture alone, which was necessarily and intrinsically connected with the notion of a verbal inspiration of scripture, is untenable from a historical point of view, nor is it taught any longer in contemporary Evangelical (ie Lutheran) theology...Only when scripture is understood as the one and only product which comes immediately from God independently of any historical and very differentiated process of becoming can I ascribe to scripure an authority which makes it completely independent of the living testimony of the church. But basically, one cannot abandon the principle of an absolute verbal inspiration of scripture, as in fact has happened, and still maintain the principle of scripture alone in the sense which it had in the time of the Reformation.... p. 362

I think this is quite perceptive. Verbal inspiration is quite a costly doctrine to jettison if you are trying to hold to a principle of scripture alone...

Rahner on Sola Fide

Rahner makes a virtuoso attempt to outline a Catholic ecclesiology that has a place for the Reformation as a movement within Catholicism. Interestingly, he goes to the Reformation solas and tries to show how, in fact, these were and are true Catholic teachings.

About Sola Fide he says:

'...the act of response to God's grace which alone gives salvation is not a work, but rather, in Pauline terms, it is faith. The Catholic doctrine is that this faith is not merely a dogmatic theory, that this faith must be based interiorly on a hope in the pure grace of God, and that this faith must be interiorly illuminated and fulfilled by what Holy Scripture calls love, calls justifying and sanctifying love. Basically an Evangelical Christian cannot raise any objections against this...' p. 361

Well, wait a minute! Perhaps not an objection, more a quibble: I do think he has clarified helpfully that faith does not equal 'some knowledge believed' (which causes such great confusion). I just don't understand what love is doing there: what can he possibly mean by this love that justifies/sanctifies? What texts is he refering to? Isn't this just a way of sneaking works back in there (in a semi-Pelagian move)?

Of course the Catholic church may decide it agreed with the Reformation all along on this, but unless it becomes the 'article on which the church stands or falls' (Luther), there is still a large difference.

Rahner on Church...

We are looking at Rahner as the counterpoint to Calvin on the church. Here's what he has to say:

If, then, there are very many Christians today who basically regard the different ecclesial communities as equally legitimate churches, this relativistic opinion in ecclesiology presupposes either that the church of Jesus Christ as he willed it does not exist at all, or that in spite of divisions among Christians it exists to such an extent that it does not really have to be brought about. Basically, then, all ecumenical efforts and endeavours for a single church would be superfluous to begin with, or ecumenical endeavours only strive for an additional unity which ultimatley would have nothing to do with the essential unity of the church which already exists. Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 353-4

To which I say, 'well, yes...!' If by unity, he means a kind of organisational or heirarchical unity, which is no unity at all unless there is a single mindedness of course...

A latent rationalism?

Paul Jewett writes:

Though essential to the Protestant view, the doctirne of the perspicuity of Scripture runs the risk of fostering an exegetical methodology that conceals a latent rationalism. It may be assumed that because of its intrinsic clarity, Scripture can be understood by anyone possessed of native intelligence. At one level, of course, this is true. One can know Scripture, since it is a human book, "from a human point of view", even as one can know Christ "from a human point of view" ... But though it is fully human, Scripture is not merely human. It rather bears witness to the divine majesty of him who addresses us in it, which is to say that its meaning is not simply at the disposal of our native intelligence. God, Creation & Revelation, p. 148

This latent rationalism is not always avoided, alas! But I would like to develop his christological analogy somewhat: Scripture is fully human but not merely human, yes; and this means that the human aspect of it is not somehow short-circuited in the processs of revelation. It is not that our rational processes are somehow denied as we read, or that these rational processes are over-ridden by some other more spiritual method, or insight. It is in, and through, this very human act of reading human words that the process of divine revelation takes place and the Spirit works!

So: it may be even and especially be at the scholar's desk that the Holy Spirit works to reveal Christ!

Martyrs and Scripture

Trust Calvin to tip me the wink that the clarity of scripture is a doctrine confirmed by the witness of the martyrs:

Now with what assurance ought we to enlist under that doctrine which we see confirmed and attested by the blood of so many holy men! They, having once received it, did not hesitate, courageously and intrepidly, and even with great eagerness, to suffer death for it. Should we not accept with sure and unshaken conviction what has been handed on to us with such a pledge? It is no moderate approbation of Scripture that it has been sealed by the blood of so many witnesses, especially when we reflect that they died to render testimony to the faith; not with fanatic excess (as erring spirits sometimes accustomed to do) but with a firm and constant, yet sober, zeal toward God... (Inst. I.viii.13)

Of course, this testimony is not sufficient to establish the authority and the clarity of scripture. But it is certainly a necessary condition of it... It is interesting to note how soaked with scripture the early accounts of the deaths of the martyrs are; and how little (by contrast) some ecclesial conception appears. This is even true of Ignatius of Antioch, strangely! Notice too how the mode of death - not in fanatic excess but in sober zeal - figures here. Of course, he has an eye to various Radical Reformation movements here....

'Do you understand what you are reading'

In Acts 8, Philip wanders off down a wilderness road away from Jerusalem. There he meets an Ethiopian eunuch, an important public official under Queen Candace. Here is obviously a man of no small authority and intelligence. What is more, he is devout, having come up to Jerusalem to worship such as he could given his physical condition. Here is a man with the ability and the hunger to know God. Seated in his chariot, we find him catching up on his reading of the prophet Isaiah.
What is not in question is the significance and authority of the scriptures: the eunuch knows already that Bible study is indispensible. His problem is not with the authority of scripture. His problem is with the clarity of scripture.


Philip, overhearing him reading from this book, asked him a great question:

Do you understand what you are reading?

The reply comes:

How can I, unless someone guides me?

And with that, Philip is invited to explain the scripture and its fulfilment in the good news of Jesus.

Now, this text has been used a model for the necessity of authorised interpretation of the scriptures. So Jaroslav Pelikan:

...if sola scripture was not enough for all these devoted readers of OT scripture without th enormative interpretation that was provdied by the apostolic witness, does the written codification that apostolic witness, in turn, in the books of the NT by itself render obsolete the Ethiopian's question, "How can I understand, unless someone instructs me?" Or does the history of the church and of its controversies raise anew the Apostle Philip's question ... It is the consensus of Orthodox and Catholic teaching that the continuing apostolic witness of the church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, as tis has been set forth in tradition, liturgy and creed, performs the same function for the iterpretation of the "Scripture" (now consisting of both the Old and New Testament) as it did for the "Scripture" when this consisted of only the OT... (Acts, p.116)

But this misses I think the point of the text itself entirely - which is not that there always needs to be an authorised interpreter of the written word, but rather that the gospel of Christ Jesus provides the hermeneutic key that clarifies the Scriptures. Under Pelikan's construal the problem is only displaced. Note the effect of this encounter: the Ethiopian is converted and gets baptised. This clarity is not a matter of quibbling over a text: this encounter actually results in the spiritual transformation of the reader.

Actually, also: he discovers not the meaning of the text so much as how the text describes Jesus Christ... the focus is shifted from the text to Christ.

Martin Luther on Changing Nappies in Faith

I knew there had to be a theology of changing nappies. Martin Luther - probably the first theologian in the history of the church to have changed nappies (is this true?) - wrote this:

Now observe that when that clever harlot, our natural reason... , takes a look at married life, she turns up her nose and says, "Alas, must I rock the baby, change its nappies, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores... ?

What then does Christian faith say to this? It opens its eyes, looks upon all these insignificant, distasteful, and despised duties in the Spirit, and is aware that they are all adorned with divine approval as with the costliest gold and jewels. It says, O God, because I am certain that thou hast created me as a man and hast from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with thy perfect pleasure. I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or change its nappies, or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? O how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labor, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in thy sight...

God, with all his angels and creatures is smiling--not because the father is changing nappies, but because he is doing so in Christian faith.

Aahh yes. I did three of these in 20 minutes not long ago, all in faith. (BTW: for 'natural reason' read: it stinks! But notice: it is not about giving the father hat-tips for doing domestic tasks.)

Brief Sydney Lives

OK, sorry to alienate my non-OZ readers (again), but here's an idea for a book I will never write (another one).

Its title is Brief Sydney Lives. It follows in the tradition of a book from the 17th century called Aubrey's Brief Lives. The idea is to write a brief - 500 words - pen portrait of the colourful characters from Sydney's history; and to write them with extreme prejudice and a great deal of wit and zest. The selections are to be eccentric, the writing one-eyed and biased. That is to say, this is not wikipedia we are writing now!

Who would qualify? Well, the key thing is they have to be a SYDNEY person. So, former PM Gough Whitlam in my opinion would not qualify, because his chief impact was on a national level. Likewise, Don Bradman, our most famous cricketer, who spent most of his career in South Australia would not qualify. But Victor Trumper would...

So would:

Roger Rogerson
Bea Miles
Arthur Stace
John Macarthur
Elizabeth Macarthur
William Bligh
Patrick White
Brett Whiteley
Harry Seidler
Michael Hutchence
Geoffrey Edelsten
Kerry Packer
Bob Gould
Samuel Marsden
Sallie-Ann Huckstepp
Robert Askin

Who else?

Providence means 'how'...

Reflecting on providence - and especially on Abraham's discovery of God the provider - with my supervisor yesterday he observed that God's providence is not a teaching about the ending of all questions about why something might have happened to me or to my loved ones. Rather, trust in God's providence is reflected in a transformation of our questions, from 'why' questions into 'how' questions. Trust in the providence of God means knowing that 'God works all things etc'; but it is not a claim about how this is going to be brought about. It is not a trust indicative of an end of questions, therefore; indeed, the Bible invites precisely this kind of questioning from the human side and doesn't give us a secret knowledge into the workings of providence that they might be silenced.

Following our meeting together, I learnt that another (young-ish) friend of mine, in addition to Byron, has contracted cancer...

You gotta love this city...

Author Oliver James in his book Affluenza says that Sydney (my home town) is the most vacuous city on the planet. Materialistic, craven, shallow, banal, spirit-less. Workaholic & shopaholic.

Can it be true? It is hard to dream when you feel you are in heaven already I guess:

Paul Kelly once sang:
Have you ever seen Sydney from a 727 at night?
Sydney shines such a beautiful light
And I can see Bondi through my window way off to the right
And the curling waves on a distant break
And the sleeping city just about to wake
Have you ever seen Sydney from a 727 at night?
But that beauty conceals - well, that's the trouble, it doesn't conceal anything! As the Whitlams (a great Sydney band) sang:
"My city is a whore, opened herself to the world
Jumped up and down in pastel shirts
And lathered up thinking about designs for T-shirts"

Or we could say with John Birmingham, a historian of the city: 'In the end there was, it seemed, no outrage so profane it could not come to pass in Sydney'...

Here's our old friend, TS Eliot, who never went to Sydney, but might have written these words for us:

O weariness of men who turn from God
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,
To arts and inventions and daring enterprises,
To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited.
Binding the earth and the water to your service,
Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains.
Dividing the stars into common and preferred,
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,
Engaged in working out a rational morality,
Engaged in printing as many books as possible,
Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,
Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm
For nation or race or what you call humanity;
Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.

Some further idle and incomplete thoughts about the clarity of scripture

Thought 1: The clarity of scripture is in fact a far more important doctrine to defend than inerrancy. Inerrancy is a red herring for evangelicals and is divisive. It focuses our attention on the wrong thing entirely, that is, the matter of 'errors' or lack thereof. Whereas, if scripture is not clear, Protestantism is a bad joke and we should become Roman Catholics tomorrow. Scripture itself does not claim its own inerrancy (nor its errancy), whereas a very strong biblical case can be made for clarity.

Thought 2: The clarity of scripture is an evangelical clarity. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that both unites scripture and renders it clear - not that the OT was without clarity. Jesus is the 'Yes' who both explains and fulfils the promises of God. The Ethopian eunuch appeared baffled by his reading of Isaiah until he met Philip who explained it to him. We shouldn't be distracted by the presence of an interpreter here: the point is not: 'you need an authorised interpreter' but rather 'Jesus makes sense of it'.

Thought 3: Of course, the doctrine of the clarity of the scriptures has little to do with how simple or how hard the scriptures are to understand. Indeed, in 2 Peter 3 Peter complains that Paul's letters have things in them that are less than crystal. Having said this though: scripture isn't as tough as is often made out!

Thought 4: The clarity of scripture is primarily a teaching about the effectiveness of scripture to do its job, which is to present us Christ Jesus. It is more about discipleship and holiness than it is about linguistic theory.

Thought 5: But the clarity of scripture DOES have implications for linguistic theory. It certainly did in the Reformation (or at least was in dialogue with 16th century humanism); it does also today...

'YOU': You oughta talk...

'YOU': You oughta talk...

New series on Words begins today!